The Mechanical Horse: How Bicycles Helped Liberate Horses Before Cars
By Paul Shapiro
When most people think about what finally freed cities from the chaos of horse-drawn life, they point to the horseless carriage, which we came to know as the automobile — and they’re not wrong. But that tells only part of the story. Yes, cars helped retire horses after thousands of years of involuntary servitude. But even before engine-powered cars, transformation was already afoot, and it quietly rolled on two wheels.
In her excellent book, The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life, Margaret Guroff details how by the early 1890s, what was then known as the new “safety bicycle” had turned cycling into practical, everyday mobility that commenced the displacement of equine labor. (Tangential: Safety bicycles also helped liberate women.)
In fact, it was many decades earlier in Germany when, in 1817, a feed shortage forced the slaughter of many horses. With necessity being the mother of invention, an early bicycle prototype was invented as “a sort of substitute horse,” according to Guroff.
Crushing the Economics of Forced Equine Labor
Fast forward to the end of the 19th century, still long before cars would dominate city streets, and bicycles proved so economical — often manufactured by carriage-makers — and otherwise superior to horses that they began threatening the economics of the equine industry. As Guroff notes:
“The bike and the streetcar blossomed in tandem, and for much of the 1890s, it wasn’t clear which would become the dominant mode of urban transport. All that was clear was that horse-drawn travel was on its way out. The price of horses dropped, and an 1898 report by the State of Pennsylvania’s secretary of internal affairs blamed ‘the very extensive introduction of electricity and the bicycle for the purposes for which animal power has always been used.’” [Emphasis added.]
Thomas Edison captured the moment in a New York World interview in 1895:
“Talking of horseless carriage suggests to my mind that the horse is doomed. The bicycle, which, 10 years ago, was a curiosity, is now a necessity. It is found everywhere. Ten years from now you will be able to buy a horseless vehicle for what you would pay today for a wagon and a pair of horses… The money spent in the keep of the horses will be saved…”
Edison wasn’t just fantasizing — he framed the bicycle’s ubiquity as a direct challenge to equine dominance, and foreshadowed cars as affordable horse replacements. Even decades before Edison made this proclamation, Guroff quotes one 1869 magazine editorial predicting about bikes that, “The two-wheeled velocipede is the animal which is to supersede everything else.”
Historians looking back describe how the bicycle undermined the economics of keeping horses — no feed, no stables, zero manure — making bike ridership a practical alternative in congested, smelly, expensive urban environments.
Some governments, already upset by the impact bicycles had on the horse economy, sough to crack down on the new horse-free vehicles that began appearing on city streets in the mid-1890s in a protectionist move for the equine industry. As Morgan Housel notes, Washington DC in 1896 sought to deny permits to horseless carriages, with the Washington Post reporting:
Rolling Forward for Animals
There’s no doubt that the internal combustion engine sealed the deal on ending millennia of whip-induced transport. But it was the safety bicycle that first loosened the reins on horse-powered society.
Edison’s 1895 proclamation and cycling-era voices framed the bicycle as a cleaner, cheaper, equally capable alternative to the horse. That shift had ripple effects: sending riders to push for paved roads and city infrastructure that would later serve cars better than carriages.
As Guroff concludes, “Bicycles made cars feasible. They also made cars necessary. Their popularity helped spark a collective leap of imagination, showing Americans the promise of self-powered travel and forging a crucial link between horse-drawn carriages and automobiles.” Indeed, even the man synonymous with car manufacturing, Henry Ford, got his start making bicycles.
If bicycles proved to be cleaner and more cost-effective than horses, will one day animal-free proteins do the same for chickens, fishes, cows, and pigs?
History is filled with countless examples of new technologies rendering centuries-old forms of animal exploitation obsolete. Virtually every time such a displacement has occurred, it’s happened either because a new alternative was cheaper and/or functionally superior to the old way. Perhaps alt-meat one day soon achieve both of those goals.
Paul Shapiro is the CEO of The Better Meat Co., the author of the national bestseller Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, a five-time TEDx speaker, and the host of the Business for Good Podcast.
